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Recycling plastic bottles

No matter how much we try to avoid plastic, we seem to always end up with at least one or two plastic bottles in our recycle bin. Sometime it’s a juice bottle, sometimes it held dish or laundry soap.

But, what about recycling plastic?

If you can’t avoid plastic, you can at least feel good about tossing that bottle in the recycle bin, right? Well…yes and no.

The trouble with plastic recycling is that it’s very inefficient. When you recycle plastic, you always end up with a lower-grade plastic. It’s more like downcycling than recycling. That’s why reusing your plastic is so important, if you can’t avoid the stuff. That trip to the recycle center extends plastic’s life, but it’s still landfill bound eventually, where it won’t break down for centuries. No good at all!

Rather than send your used plastic bottles through the waste stream, you can reuse plastic bottles in all sorts of fun, crafty ways! Here are some ideas to get you started.

You can use your crafty skills to repurpose those plastic bottles into cute home and garden accessories. From lighting to window treatments, there are lots of cute ways to divert that waste from the bin!

1. Make plastic bottle lights. You can whip up a string of plastic bottle lights, like in the photo above. Just use a small drill bit to drill holes in the bottoms of the bottles, stick an LED Christmas light through each one, and hang! If you need to make it more secure, you can use a little hot glue to hold the bottles in place.

2. Create a chandelier. Got a big stash of empty bottles? Over at Dollar Store Crafts, Heather shows you how to turn them into a chandelier!

3. Upcycled vases. Wrap those empty bottles up and turn them into sweet vases for the table. You can use raffia, like she did at Zakka Life, or try cutting up scrap fabric into super skinny strips to up the recycled content even more.